Dan Bern

Bern was reared in Iowa as the cello-playing, baseball-loving progeny of two Old World Jewish artists in the American heartland and built a strong underground following on his prodigious output of topical sardonic, literary songs and comical cultural commentary in Los Angeles’s early 1990s neo-folk music scene. The consummate traveler’s tales are alternately joyously obscene, tender and even devout, taking on a persona that interrogates God and indulges in a little speculative time travel, exploring a future dystopian America, or paying tribute to baseball. He once performed under the moniker International Jewish Banking Conspiracy, contributed 16 songs to the biopic parody film Walk Hard, and wrote the novel Quitting Science under the pen name Cunliffe Merriwether with the preface written under his own name.